This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
Her debut book, “Glitter and Concrete,” chronicles the historical evolution of drag in New York, complete with Mae West’s drag origins.
Raised by a 1950s movie musical-obsessed interior designer mother who counted drag artists as friends in the early ’80s, freelance writer and photographer Elyssa Maxx Goodman has been a drag devotee since the ripe old age of 7 or 8, when she first laid eyes on a film called To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.
“Vida Boheme [Patrick Swayze’s character] is styled almost like a sort of 1950s or throwback kind of gal, so it was just a natural progression for me as a child,” Goodman muses. “The film has a lot to critique today certainly, but for myself and for a generation of people, it was the first time we saw drag.”
Goodman’s mother’s influence is a great source of inspiration and pride for the writer. “To be so fearless, to spend time with people who were being constantly maligned and stigmatized throughout the entire culture at that time, makes me very proud to have had a mother like that,” she says. “She was always talking about treating people with kindness, and it’s nice to know that she did.” There’s no doubt she’d beam with pride about the release of Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City, her daughter’s lovingly researched debut book. From her apartment in Manhattan, Goodman talked to Shondaland about how Glitter and Concrete came to be.
VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: Your book is thoroughly researched and was obviously a labor of love. Drag goes back thousands of years — how did you figure out where to start?
ELYSSA MAXX GOODMAN: Excellent question! I laugh at it now, because my original book proposal said 1945 to present, which is so funny to me because the book starts in 1865. I wanted to write an introduction to how we got to 1945, and then it just kept going. There are incredible books that have been written that chronicle this time. One of my favorites was a book called Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage by the writer and scholar Gillian Rodger, and it’s all about male impersonation between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.
That was an amazing resource to be able to draw from, but even beyond that, just digging and digging into the people that she mentions — digging into the people that are mentioned on Mo B. Dick’s Drag King History.com. Ultimately, I chose 1865 because I wanted the most diversity possible that would have been present on the stage at that point.
VMS: When you were doing your research, what were some of the roadblocks that you came across, and how did you overcome them?
EMG: So, this is another sort of fun detail about the book: I got my book deal in March of 2020, so any archives I wanted to visit obviously were unavailable. I had to push a lot of the archival work that I wanted to do toward the end of the process. But it’s almost like the pandemic couldn’t have happened at a better time technologically because so much has been digitized, so it was a disheartening roadblock, but my work was not impossible. Primary sources had been archived, and books had been digitized. Because the libraries were closed, I was able to order a lot of books I needed online cheaply and have them delivered to the house.
VMS: The whole thing about getting into the process of writing a historical tome is you can dig and research, and then you have to do the work of making the research conversational, which can present challenges if you’re covering a period of time when you or your sources were alive.
EMG: One of the things that was really interesting about this process is I decided to start working on this book in March of 2018. What happened shortly after that was I had pitched a drag history column to Condé Nast’s Them, so I did that for a while and a lot of the other historical writing I have been doing for magazines. The pieces that I would do for Them were usually 1,000 to 2,000 words. I said to myself, “You are not going to sit down and write 40-to-80,000 words in a single shot, so write 1,000 words a day or thereabouts to make this book happen.” I would rather have more than less, so there was a lot more. Writing about history for an audience of non-academics was just part of the way I wrote at that point.
VMS: And you developed a platform for the book in doing so.
EMG: Yeah! Whenever I was writing those columns or those historical pieces for Them, it was really important to me to be able to impart to a new audience why the things they were reading were important, and what effects they had now. The audiences for drag are vast now, but the person I thought about the most when I was writing the book was a queer Midwestern teen. I wanted to be able to write a book where if they had no other resources, or even if they did and wanted to add to them, they would be able to find themselves in a book. This became even stronger as all of the anti-drag regulations were happening. The world was a lot different when I was working on the book five and a half years ago.
VMS: Isn’t that crazy to consider?
EMG: It is absolutely bananas. It’s not to say that there hasn’t been anti-drag anything in my lifetime, but in my adult experience of living in the world in the last, let’s call it 15 years, there has not been a reaction to drag like this. Probably naively, I was like, “Oh, we’re out of the woods.” So, I was shocked by it, but anti-drag sentiment runs in cycles.
VMS: As a GenXer, I’ve certainly seen this before, but I also expected by this point that we’d be out of the woods. I think everyone kind of did. The relentless targeting and cruelty — never did I imagine at this stage in our lives that we would be dealing with this.
EMG: Yeah, it’s painful and upsetting. And it also has historical precedent.
VMS: It’s so great that your book exists because people read survival stories when they themselves need fuel for their own survival. You break the history of drag down into 10-year bites for people. If you had to name two eras, what do you think were the two most pivotal in terms of a greater cultural understanding of what drag is?
EMG: It’s an interesting question. First when you said “pivotal,” I thought of something different and what I thought was a turning point for even how drag was perceived by the queer community. For a very long time and I would say into the ’90s, drag was looked down on by parts of the queer community as well. I remember when I was working on the chapter about the ’60s, I remember thinking I could probably write an entire book about 1968. One of the reasons is because of the documentary The Queen. Part of the reason that I started working on the book was because Flawless Sabrina [from The Queen] passed away in November 2017, and I wanted to make sure that no other stories got lost. She was a foundational figure and was by the standards of historical drag figures well documented, but how much was that, even?
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VMS: Before I saw that film, my awareness of her was minimal.
EMG: Sure! I wanted to make sure that her story was honored, but also all the people who came before her and after her who made drag what it is now. What happened with The Queen is that Andy Warhol is helpful in having the film made. I don’t think he’s listed as a producer, but I think he connected her to the producers who eventually made the film. The film went to Cannes! It was rated X, and it was one of the first places that mainstream culture was able to see drag. There were times when there was a lot of straight drag in mainstream culture, like Milton Berle or Cary Grant for comedic effect, but to see actual drag artists working was significantly rare.
They were venues like the Club 82 in the 1950s, but it was run by the Mafia, essentially like an underground operation. This film made celebrities of a lot of its performers, which is so wild to think now. In the context of 1968, even within the queer community, drag was seen as less than. It feels cliché to mention the Stonewall Uprising, but one of the things I think is really significant is that it was actually started by drag queens and transgender women of color. The Stonewall, at that time, was kind of regarded as the bar that let people in that wouldn’t be let in anywhere else. So, there were a lot of these, like, white upper-middle-class gay men who came back from Fire Island that weekend and were like, “Why are they doing that? That’s so tacky. That’s not part of what we do here.”
Stonewall was by no means the only act of civil disobedience up to that point as it relates to queer liberation certainly, but in terms of it becoming the shot heard around the world, so to speak, drag queens and transgender women were central to that fight. In terms of acceptance which lasted the longest, that started probably in the ’90s. I spoke to Zaldy [RuPaul’s fashion designer], and he said this [drag] was not a career choice in the ’80s. It was considered tacky and kind of lame; then, this generation of people leaned into it.
VMS: To me, drag is the most elevated art form because it demands so much of a performer, depending on the lane you go in. For example, to compete on RuPaul’s Drag Race, you have to be able to sing, you have to be able to sew, you have to know choreo, you have to be able to dance, you have to be able to do improv … you have to be a true renaissance person to be able to do drag.
EMG: And then on top of all that, it’s running your own business, doing your own PR, doing your own social media, being your own accountant, all that kind of stuff. One of the people I interviewed, Miss Understood, said, “We weren’t trying to look like women; we were trying to look like drag queens.” What happened in the ’90s, RuPaul just became so visible. If it was possible to have this kind of reception, then maybe it was possible to build a life this way. In terms of [then-Mayor Rudy] Giuliani in New York, drag became a way to get people into bars and entertain them if you couldn’t have them dance. So, I think continued acceptance came with representation, and RuPaul had a lot to do with that.
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VMS: I remember RuPaul from the club scene in New York. Drag is traditionally a queer space. As a cis woman writing about drag, how has our ability to step into that space evolved?
EMG: There were many women doing drag early on who were not necessarily queer. That happened in theater because if you wanted to do comedy, there were significantly fewer roles for women. If there were more roles available for men, you could dress up in drag. There are many different origin stories of drag — it’s outside of the scope of my book, but Kabuki theater actually begins with female sex workers in Japan. In Japan, there is also a group that’s been around for over 100 years called Takarazuka, which is an all-female drag company known for very elaborate, large-scale stage shows.
The other part of that becomes what is drag, and what are the ways we perform gender on a regular basis, whether or not we intend to do drag, if that makes sense. If I’m giving a presentation, I don’t look the same as when I’m on the couch watching New Girl. We perform gender without even knowing it. For the purposes of the book, I define drag as gender performance with the intention of creating drag on or off stage, but there are people in the book who are also cis women who are part of drag stories as well. Mae West is a huge one. She learned how to create a persona from the drag performers she witnessed when she was working on Coney Island.
VMS: I loved reading that — that was so fascinating. It all made sense given the context of her performance and persona.
EMG: She was heavily informed by the drag performer Bert Savoy, who was a huge phenomenon. She hung out in Greenwich Village a lot. One of her plays is called The Drag and is another of these moments that brought drag to mainstream audiences. It featured gay men in drag as drag artists, which didn’t happen on the Broadway stage or the “legitimate” stage, as it was known at that time.
Then you have people like Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj who bring the essential nature of drag to their own performances. So, the point of me bringing up all of those things is to say drag is a queer art form, but I think it can inspire anyone, and I think anyone can do it. Another cis queer woman that I talk about in the book is Ana Matronic, who has identified as a drag artist for the longest time — she’s one of the founders of the Scissor Sisters. I think sometimes the nature of how we comport ourselves is drag.
The other part of it is how do I tell this story and make sure that I am doing the subject justice. Ultimately, the book is not about me at all. The book is about telling the stories of the people who lived and built the foundation of this art form, and doing so respectfully and with context. It’s been a dream to have 93 interviews with 85 or 86 people who wanted to share their stories with me and trusted me to do that. It’s an incredible honor, and I think in the process of considering my own demographics, shall we say, the way to write this book with those in mind was to make it about the subject and to honor the subject. That’s what I wanted to do. The stories need to get told, and I was honored that these people who shared their stories with me felt that as well.
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VMS: I bet. Considering the process of writing a book like this, are you an outliner instead of a channeler?
EMG: I’m not so much an outliner as I am a lister. I need to have a list in front of me so I don’t forget and so I can kind of check things off. Putting it all together for me is like building a hamburger, not necessarily starting with the bun. I might start with the burger, then I’ll put a piece of lettuce under it, and then the cheese on top, and then, like, the bottom part of the bun — then I have the full chapter. Especially on days when I knew I needed to do my 1,000 words, I would write about a subject, then weave the sections together throughout the course of a chapter or throughout the course of this book.
VMS: So, you might in a week work on the 1800s, the ’70s, and the 2000s …
EMG: No, no, I worked in chronological order. I did chunks at a time and then wove them together. During the pandemic specifically, I set up a pretty standard schedule for myself every day, not usually by choice. Even during the pandemic when nothing was open, I would get up at 10 a.m., do my ablutions and exercise, then I would start writing probably by noon. I’d write until I had 1,000 words or until it was about 7 or 8 at night, taking breaks in between to go for walks, for meals, grocery shopping, whatever.
Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City
VMS: How is your first draft different from the final project?
EMG: I work better with deadlines because if I just have one big deadline at the end, who knows what will happen, so I [would] turn in the book in chunks. I’d never written a book before, so I turned in one chapter just to see if I was on the right track, then I fixed those things, and then did another chapter.
VMS: How do you want the kid you envisioned reading your book in the Midwest to feel when they put it down?
EMG: Seen. Like their stories matter and can’t be erased. When I started this book five and a half years ago, it was a very different time than it is now. I want it to find people who need it. I want to help people know that they have roots that can’t be erased and that these roots are resilient. I hope it empowers people — people who are seeking a history of their own or seeking to learn about the community — and creates opportunities for understanding. I would love for the book to be a jumping-off point for people and an introduction.
VMS: As allies and supporters of drag artists, what is the most effective way to support them now?
EMG: The first way is to hire them and pay them as the artists they are, as much as you’re able to. The second is to advocate for drag — not just as an art form but within the realms of freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Supporting local drag is really important too. Tip them always! Promote their work online, and go to their drag brunches and performances. Donate money to causes that support drag artists, like the ACLU Drag Defense Fund — part of the ticket sales of my book launch will be going to that as well. Continue to engage with drag. People forget that it’s an art form with, like you said, thousands of years of history, and it needs to get the credit it deserves for being that.